The Land Sings Back exhibition

‘The land knows you, even when you are lost.’

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potawatomi botanist and author

The Land Sings Back reimagines our relationship to our breathing planet through the work of thirteen artists with ancestries across South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Engaging with these cultural vocabularies through a lens of environmental justice, the exhibition approaches drawing as an active agent of social history, Indigenous knowledge and ecofeminist philosophy, rather than as a tool of illustration, classification and conquest. Exposing entanglements between the human-vegetal-animal, the works explore how botanical consciousness can reshape relationships among multitudinous life-forms, making room for regeneration amidst indebtedness, infrastructural collapse and neocolonial inheritance. The Land Sings Back encourages a connection with ancestral wisdom, reciprocal rather than extractive relationships with land.

Participating artists include Lado Bai, Shiraz Bayjoo, Lavkant Chaudhary, Jasmine Nilani Joseph, Manjot Kaur, Otobong Nkanga, Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah, Joydeb Roaja, Anupam Roy, Anushka Rustomji, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, U.Arulraj and Charmaine Watkiss.

The exhibition is curated by Natasha Ginwala, Artistic Director of Colomboscope, co-curator of Sharjah Biennial 16 and one of Frieze’s Five Curators to Watch in 2025. It is produced as a collaboration between Colomboscope, Sri Lanka and Drawing Room.